A Foundation’s Bid to Build Access and Change Narratives Around Government Spending

Ever since President Ronald Reagan joked, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help,” it's been a common refrain. Government is inefficient, government doesn't work, government should butt out of people's lives.

For philanthropy, positioned apart from but often adjacent to government, perspectives on the proper role and scale of the public sector vary widely. In liberal funding circles, at least, there’s long been a cadre of grantmakers pushing back against the Reaganite position and making the case for government spending as one of the most powerful possible levers to pull for social good.

A new initiative from one such funder, the Marguerite Casey Foundation, seeks not only to change the narrative of government as problem, but to actively ensure that government dollars are put to good use. The Public Dollars for Public Good (PDPG) initiative is an effort to promote and increase the use of public dollars to benefit all Americans, in particular those who have been historically excluded from accessing public funds. PDPG has awarded an inaugural $5 million in general operating grants to 10 organizations seeking to give communities better access to federal dollars and to increase their decision-making power over how those dollars are spent. The initiative also seeks to raise awareness around public sector spending and to change narratives around government’s role in providing for the public.

The initiative’s 10 initial grantees are Native Americans in Philanthropy, the Southern Economic Advancement Project, Addition Collective, Heartland Fund of the Rural Democracy Initiative, the Amalgamated Foundation, Seattle Solidarity Budget, Kansas City Tenants, Economic Security Project, The Workers Lab and the Center for Working Families.

The inspiration for this new initiative derived from the conversations around police funding that came after George Floyd's murder in 2020, as well as from the passage of several COVID relief spending packages, including the the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act. Currently, philanthropy has the opportunity to influence the movement of a gigantic $4 trillion in federal funding being disbursed through that bill as well as three others: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.

"If the summer of 2020 taught us anything, it's that those [funds for policing] were public dollars for public bad, like the use of public dollars to oppress people, to isolate people, to kill people," said Carmen Rojas, president and CEO of the Marguerite Casey Foundation. "With these big investments that started in early 2020, we sort of saw what public dollars for public good can look like — investments in rural communities, investments in broadband technology, investments in things that people need to live their day-to-day lives."

"As a foundation, I thought it would be a missed opportunity if we had not chosen to step in to support the kinds of leaders and experiments that demonstrated what public dollars for the public good looked like for everyday people," Rojas said.

Shifting conversations on housing

KC Tenants, one of PDPG's grantees, is the citywide tenants’ union in Kansas City, Missouri. With almost 10,000 members throughout the city, KC Tenants’ goal is to ensure that everyone in the city has safe, accessible and affordable homes. As part of its work, it runs local policy campaigns, supports tenants organizing in their buildings and backs neighborhood organizing to push back against gentrification that displaces people.

KC Tenants received its PDPG grant for its work in municipal social housing. To date, it has helped shift millions of dollars in public funds toward affordable housing by shifting conversations about housing policy and tenants’ rights.

"Our North Star as a tenant union is municipal social housing, which is housing that would be offered in the private market, not available for speculation or profit," said Tara Raghuveer, founding director of KC Tenants. "We want that housing to be publicly backed in perpetuity. We want it to be democratically controlled by the people who live in it. This is a pretty long-term vision for housing in Kansas City, but it's one that we're actively campaigning around."

According to Raghuveer, KC Tenants has done base-building in various neighborhoods throughout the city, and crucially, has analyzed the city's budget to ascertain where money is going and what could be reallocated toward housing. For Raghuveer, tenant organizing around the public processes governing municipal social housing is "a major intervention in the world as it is, where tenants have so little power and landlords have almost total power over their lives."

"We've observed that the people's ability to interact with the public processes around the city's budget is limited at best. There's not actually a robust way that people get to make decisions about issues of public money that concern their lives," Raghuveer said. "We'd like to see that change.”

Proof of concept for workers’ rights

Another one of PDPG's grantees is The Workers Lab, a nonprofit investor aimed at finding new ways to give workers a better chance to succeed. A kind of worker-power-oriented think tank, The Workers Lab invests in new ideas, studies how those new ideas can transform systems and structures, and gets those ideas in front of decision-makers.

The Workers Lab has chosen to use its general operating grant from PDPG for the further development of a flexible work platform, which will pair gig workers or other nontraditional workers in a particular region with recruiting employers who need work done flexibly. While numerous gig work platforms already exist, The Workers Lab’s platform centers control and protections for workers, as well as partnerships with public agencies, with an initial pilot in the city of Long Beach, California.

"The project is to demonstrate to the country, to people in power who are making important decisions about work and workers, that this kind of work doesn't have to be not great. It can be really good-quality work for those in this country who either want to work flexibly or need to," said Adrian Haro, CEO of The Workers Lab.

The project will aim to show how leveraging public dollars in partnership with public agencies, businesses and community-based organizations can make it possible for flexible employment to deliver robust worker protections and rights — including fair pay, access to benefits, dignity and opportunity for advancement. Ideally, the platform could be replicated and scaled up in cities across the U.S.

"We all in some way, shape or form touch government when we walk out the door. When we take a shower, we're using a public utility. Some of us are getting on a bus the government touched to go to work. The government touches every single part of our lives for the most part, and they pack a punch. Or at least they can with money," Haro said. "We've just got to remind them that they can and make sure that their impact is centered on workers, centered on people, and making the access to that impact in the community as easy and as frictionless as possible."

Accessing public dollars

In addition to showing how public funds can be spent for the collective good, PDPG is also looking to increase access to public dollars, particularly for historically excluded communities.

"People of color and poor people have been marginalized from these opportunities," Rojas said, adding that there are several reasons that many communities face difficulty in accessing public benefits.

"I think for most intents and purposes, it's racism," Rojas said. "I think for most intents and purposes, we're suspicious of poor people. And frankly, we lay at the feet of poor people the failures of our economy and the failures of our government to actually help them meet their needs."

PDPG's grantees want to make it easier for the communities they serve to access public funding. One example is Native Americans in Philanthropy, an organization dedicated to advancing equitable and effective philanthropy in Native communities, which has secured more than $27 million in federal funding for those communities. Native Americans in Philanthropy will use the grant from PDPG to establish an office of strategic initiatives in collaboration with the U.S. Department of the Interior, with the goal of increasing the allocation of federal funds for Native communities.

In addition to those historically denied access to federal funding, many communities simply aren't made aware that such funding is available to them. According to Rojas, the U.S. government does a poor job of getting the word out about funding opportunities.

The Heartland Fund — housed under the Rural Democracy Initiative — will use its PDPG grant through its Resource Rural program to help rural communities access federal funds and organize to ensure that the money will actually end up benefiting their communities.

For PDPG, it's crucial that not only are communities aware of the funds available to them, but that they feel empowered to advocate for their use, Rojas said. “To be able to set the priorities for how public dollars are spent feels paramount to me.”

Changing the narrative

A third aspect of PDPG's work — and perhaps the most important — is to change pre-existing narratives around government and its role in people's lives. For decades now, derisive and all too often racially charged phrases like "government handouts" and "welfare queens" have been rallying cries against public spending. "We are decades deep into a project that has made [people] believe that government is inefficient, bureaucratic and doesn't work," Rojas said.

"Everything around us tells us that rugged individualism is paramount, but we know that's not true," Rojas said. "We know every major corporation in this country gets a subsidy… We know billionaires and millionaires get subsidies. We know that they get tax breaks… If you have any sort of wealth or resource in this country, there is a way that your government is working for you."

The time is ripe, Rojas said, to change people's perception of the government into something that can and should work for everyone, rather than a select few. "I feel like we're in this moment that I see as the golden age of reinvesting in our collective commitment to a government that works for us.”

For Rojas, PDPG's role extends beyond its support for its grantees. "It's also for people who live in these communities to plant a seed in their imaginations that our government should be working for them, that this is ours… and that it's worth fighting for."

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